Hobo goes Radio

I am just trying out Radio for now, does this mean Blogger shame? :) While I think Blogger is great and I could pay for Blogger Plus I really need the features that Radio provides, so if I am to spend the £££ it looks like radio is in with a chance. Not sure how I will update both Blogs but expect both to carry the same content. Please feel free to visit my Radio BLOG and post some comments :)

More news on the future of C# and C++

Bill Gates talking about the future of C#, he also talks about the next version of C++ (and its 98% basis on the ISO C++ standard). He also makes a menion of a interesting defect tracking tool by Microsoft Research, I hope they release it.

The future of C#

Rotor already has a beta version of generics so it makes sense that it will make its way into the main stream CLI. The FAQ also shows that Microsoft plan to add these features to VB.NET and J#, this is great, great news.

Hello

To Kim, Cath, Cliff and Mike :D

Yahoo to go to PHP

The major reason here above languages like ASP/CF is to save $$$ and JSP/Java due to the threading support on FreeBSD. I do wonder what Mono would have added to this.

PHP and ASP.NET at PHP DevCon

Kudos to Christian Wenz on this talk

Using .NET with PHP via COM

My book was first ;-)

The Lizard Book

Or O'Reillys PHP Cookbook :)

C# and Parrot

Not sure of the context of this but I came across this news snippet of the folks on the Parrot team talking to the folks on the DotGNU team about Parrot and C#. I can only assume it means that the Parrot team are looking at ways of running C# in the Parrot VM.

Rotor 1.0 released

Adds Mac OSX support (Linux is available but not offical) plus a few other bits and bobs, kudos to the Rotor team on getting this out.

Code Generation

Interesting project to create a code generator. Several of these exist and come in two parts, a XML system to allow you define a mini language (which allows you to define your language of choice, VB.NET/C# etc) and a parser to convert your mini language to code. I have not had a chance to use this yet but as part of my work I can see its use as a possible way of creating a simplified SQL based query system and to allow large blocks of code to be easily created. I have yet to do the research (and find the time to do the research), John Lam however has a interesting story to tell about his research.

Smalltalk

Picked up a Smalltalk book the other day, I do intend to learn Smalltalk so that I can research its use in .NET and see what changes it has in its OOP support. I have heard great things about Smalltalk so this going to be one heck of a journey :)

.NET in WSH

Spent the last week writing a WSH file, while looking for info I came across this app. Not tried it yet but it looks interesting.

Popfile

Interesting opensource Perl app that uses AI (Baysian rules) to filter POP3 email. If you have a lot of email boxes/spam its worth a look.

Rotor mail list website

This is a nice .NET/Rotor web site, of interest to me (other than the Rotor info) was the work that has been done on running Mindstorms with .NET (some of you may remember my research into running Rotor/Mono on Mindstorms. Not looked at this in great depth yet but it will ASAP.

BTW the serversides Java/.NET Petstore benchmark PDF (that is causing so much trouble in the Java/.NET camps right now) is available on the site, you will need to belong to the mailing list to obtain this though.

Microsoft BLOG software

Given the recent news on Microsofts stance on employees blogging this article was interesting. Its a rumor that Microsoft is creating BLOG software for SharePoint server. If this is true then this could prove to be very interesting, the article mentions that Microsoft could host and if we get RSS plus all the goodies that Blogger Plus and Radio etc offer it could be killa bit of BLOG software. I would however wait and see how they offer the product though.

Happy Bonfire Night

Stay safe

Borland for Mono

This is a article from the Register on a rumor that Borland is looking at using Mono to add .NET support to Kylix its Linux RAD IDE tool. Borland have not supported this claim (nor denied it) but if its true then I hope that the work they do they share with the Mono project. Borland should take a leaf out of Macromedias book, they use the Apache AXIS project in their Jrun product however its a common fact that Jrun engineers are active members of the AXIS project.

ondotnet.com

The new O'Reilly .NET info portal, I am looking foward to seeing to what they put up, content wise.

Congrats to Peter Drayton

On joining the Microsoft CLR team, I don't doubt that Microsoft would benefit the services of the other usual suspects, Sam, Ingo and Jason :)

Mad Week

Just had a mad week, hopefully this week will be a little easier (fingers crossed) and I'll get some time to BLOG.

Sun vs .NET

Another Register article, this one on comments made by Sun on the Java/.NET war (silly though it is). Should Sun dismiss IBM like this? I think not. I have always seen IBM as a strong supporter of Java, look at the research work they done with alphaWorks etc. I would love to see them do the same thing with .NET, if Sun is going to behave like this then maybe IBM should plonk them selves in the middle :)

Microsoft Bloggers

This article on the Register seems a little strange. I don't understand why Microsoft is being like this, what harm can a BLOG possibly do? Look at Macromedia, so far one of the big companies to embrace BLOGs and use them in a very postive way. Maybe Microsoft should take note.

DIY

What a weekend, spent saturday looking after my 10 month yr old god daughter and Sunday fitting a dish washer/drier. Saturday night was great, my elder sister got engaged :D

North Code

North Code are a company based out of Ottawa, Canada and are the creators of SWF Studio, a great tool for producing projectors and screen savers from Flash files. Tim Goss the guy who leads the development of SWF Studio and is the founder of Northcode, is a great guy. I know Northcode is going places, so if you use Flash then give them a visit.

.NET Languages

Jason Bock is running a .NET Languages page, I have sent him some info on the Ruby/.NET effort. He mentions that he is looking to research Ruby. I cannot recommend more strongly enough that you do, if you have ever seen what the LISP CLOS system brought to OOP then you will like Ruby.

Update

Apologies for the lack of updates. I have had a bad cold, moved house and have a deadline for a major project to finish. Its just work, work, work :)

Blog for fun

Brian Gaf asks why is blogging and where he is going wrong. My advice is not to take it to heart too much, do what you enjoy and report what you find, be it fluff or not. Most important of all, enjoy it.

Moving House

Me and Em should (fingers crossed) be moving into our new home on Friday. I been packing the last couple of weeks and I never knew I had so much stuff. Worst offender is my book collection, 200+ computer books plus another 50 or so books on other subjects. I have no idea where I will put them all :)

Blog Wear

Might get a Mug and Bag to match my T, hmmmm.

.NET Opensource

From a mail on the CLR mailing list is a list of .NET Frameworks.

Following are some of the Frameworks (OpenSource), mostly ports of their JAVA implementations.

1) http://mavnet.sourceforge.net/
Maverick.NET is a .NET port of Maverick, a Model-View-Controller (aka "Model framework for web publishing. It is a minimalist framework which focuses solely on MVC logic, allowing you to generate presentation using a variety of templating and transformation technologies

2)Logging Framework for .NET (http://sourceforge.net/projects/log4net)
The .NET implementation of the popular log4j Java API providing flexible and arbitrarily granular control over log management and configuration.

3)Object Persistance Framework for .NET
(http://sisyphuspf.sourceforge.net/home.htm)

4)Nvelocity (http://nvelocity.sourceforge.net)

NVelocity is a .Net-based template engine. It permits anyone to use the simple yet powerful template language to reference objects defined in .Net code

5)NLucene (http://sourceforge.net/projects/nlucene)
NLucene is the .NET implementation of the Lucene high-performance, full-featured text search engine.

As the email states a lot of the projects are Java ports of tools from the Apache Jakarta group, it would be nice to see a hosted project like this for .NET (where we can group .NET projects togther).

Hosting Cassini within Apache

An interesting french article (translation was done with astavista) on hosting Microsoft's free little ASP.NET web server in Apache 2. Take a look at the comments on the asp.nets forums as well.

New Servers from Microsoft

PHP programmer interview

On John Lims BLOG I spotted a article on a developer who has created a OOP lib for PHP, in the QA session I spotted the following when asked what he thought of .NET

Vince: From what I know about .NET, it's much better (technology-wise) than PHP. What's stopping me from using it is the company that's behind it. It's not that I *hate* Microsoft, but I don't like their tactics... Also, I can't understand why anybody would want to work with a technology that has that awful a EULA (End User Licence Agreement).

I am beginning to feel like I am saying this over and over again (maybe I am) but may I suggest Vince you take a look at Mono. Your reply only serves to reinforce my view that certain folk ignore .NET because its Microsoft and don't bother to do the research first.

Vince goes on to say that ASP.NET is just like JSP, in some reguards it is but many reguards its not, again a case for better research.

AXIS 1.0 is released (from Sam Ruby)

This should make its way into Jrun quite soon, congrats to the AXIS team.

Shake your Faith (from Chris Sells)

I understand this completely. I think Justin is right that if he has grown tired of the corp bullsh1te that so often effects our industry that he looks for the next challenge. You have to earn your crust to pay your mortage and feed your family but do you really need to be fed up to the back teeth doing it.

VB.NET Doc tools (from Chris Sells)

This works really well, its free, integrates into VS.NET and has got loads of features on the way!

.NET compiler tools

If you have used compiler tools such as Yacc and Bison before then this will be of interest, not tried them out yet but they look interesting.

Macromedia DesDev center for CFMX and J2EE

Some interesting resources, hope we will soon see articles on using web services (such as JRuns AXIS based system).

Robin Williams

Is da man, I heard in a recent TV interview that he has over 50 bikes, some mountain bikes, mostly road bikes. Would love to see a collection like that, must have some classics.

.NET for other platforms

Interesting article on using the .NET Framework on other platforms. The comments are full of Microsoft bashers, even if you hate Microsoft that does not mean you have to hate efforts made by folks like Mono to give us a cross platform, powewrful development framework. It makes me wonder if people will just go to any excuse to bash Microsoft.

Zeev Suraski interview

About the compilation issue - PHP does not translate very well (read: at all) to machine code, or byte-code similar to that of the CLR. That is one of the reasons that PHP doesn't have a CLR implementation. For the same reason, the .NET implementation of Perl is very limited. Scripting languages simply don't translate well to the CLR bytecode, or to machine code.

My question to you Zeev is that when Perl/Python move to the Parrot VM where will PHP stand on this issue then. These languages are moving to this model at the very least (other scripting languages like Ruby and TCL will be able to make use of the changes to the CLR, dynamnic types etc), is the optimizer enough when other languages in the PHP sphere are moving to a compiled model?

Microsoft looks at commerical license for shared source

Starting with the SSCLI (Rotor) and CE.NET first they looking at a way of allowing developers to both modify shared source code and sell those modifications. In terms of Rotor this will really open up platform ports, tools and languages (I once mentioned to Jeremy Alliare that the JScript.NET code could form the basis for a .NET version of SSAS but he stated that the license prevented him from doing so, not anymore hey Jeremy).

The article goes on to say that a lot of the product groups are looking at shared source, I hope that ASP.NET and ADO.NET join the party ;-)

Flash Remoting BLOG

Set up by the Boston Macromedia User Group (BMUG) this is a BLOG on all issues realting to Flash Remoting, will be interesting to see it develop.

Blogger T

Got my Blogger.com T today, I will wear it with pride :)

Peter Joel

Fellow Team Macromedia member and blogger, thanks for linking to me and welcome to blogger land ;-)

Team Macromedia

As of today I will be prowling the Flash Remoting forums as a Team Macromedia member, after 4 years and 1000+ posts on the Generator forums it will be nice to return. Expect to see lots of FlashRemoting news in here as a result :)

Flash Remoting price worries

Seeing a few concerns over price worries for Flash Remoting (and the fact it costs more than CFMX and Jrun), I understand these but its commerical product aimed at the enterprise market. I stand by Macromedia but what I don't want to see is a "Generator" style price issue and the product to loose developers and die a death, its a great product and I hope lots of folks are making of use it. I hope that some point for a future release they can introduce a pricing plan to cover as bigger an audience as possible. It deserves it.

Mesh reports FlashRemoting MX

Mike Chambers reports that FlashRemoting is available, note that his comment.

and the .NET version works of course, with Microsoft .NET servers.

Means that the .NET version will work with any OS that has the .NET Framework 1.0 installed.

The comments mention a wish for a PHP version, would love to see a Perl/Python/Ruby version too.

FlashRemoting MX is available

The best way of getting data from to .NET/J2EE and Flash. Bring out the books !! :)

ASP.NET for Dreamweaver Forum

Kudos to Microsoft for setting this up.

Earthquake

The UK was hit by a earthquake today, 4.8 on the richter scale. Nothing serious when compared to the quakes that hit places like the US and Africa but it scared me :)

Rise of the Mono

I am little amazed by the opensource world, some folks are embracing .NET and some think its Microsoft devil spawn, the latter forget projects like Mono and the fact that it will form a big part of Linux (Mono will be included in most distros and will form the future in KDE and GNOME) but also the fact it has nothing to do with Microsoft. My hope is that Mono is going to find its way into other opensource projects like Mozzila, I wonder if Netscape would oppose it? ;-)